• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Creating new languages

quarky

Banned
Q
Joined
Oct 15, 2007
Messages
20,121
I want to write some stuff about this subject in the morning. This is to remind me. Interesting stuff. I'll be back Too tired now.
 
I guess we could use this thread as a wish-list for what we want in a language until Quarky gets around to telling us what the thread is supposed to be.

I'd like a language where a person's (or animal's or object's) gender is indicated by an optional prefix rather than being inherent in the word. The way you could just leave off the prefix for gender neutral statements, instead of having to kludge things by using both terms together (eg, "he/she", "his or her") or using the plural as a gender-neutral alternative ("their" instead of "his or her").

I'd also like to be able to refer to people in the fourth person, to able to clearly distinguish the third person (he or she) being talked about from the fourth-person we're discussing them interacting with. For example, "Harry got into an argument with a stranger, and he punched him in the face". Did Harry punch the stranger in the face, or did the stranger punch Harry in the face? Since we're limited to the third person, the sentence can be read either way.
 
Last edited:
A language must be spoken by at least two people who would have a reason to spek it rather than any other language. To ensure it continues thine it should be spoken by many people. Some languages are invented so that people who have no common language can speak to each other.
 
I tried learning Esperanto once, but although the idea was a good one, but the fact that it was a deliberate construction meant that it was never really going to become well established, in my opinion.

Note to self - must go and look it up!

We are lucky that English has really become the international language.
 
Sorry I left this thread in the lurch.
I had to learn Esparanto as a kid. Weird dad.
Good article in latest Newyorker magazine.
Will be back with detail, and opinions.
Being called to leave presently. Apologies.
 
quarky said:
I want to write some stuff about this subject in the morning. This is to remind me. Interesting stuff. I'll be back Too tired now.
Click to expand...

Well, if you're still interested 5 years later, look up Nicaraguan Sign Language. Spontaneously invented by deaf kids, and a proof of the intrinsic nature of language... in short, that we "develop" language rather than "learn" it.
 
The Newyorker magazine is the dec. 24 and 31 issue, this year.
Article is called "Utopian for Beginners" by Joshua Foer.

These articles don't seem to be available on line; not sure. And I'm not clear on how much I can re-print here, without violating stuff.
I'll be back to paraphrase some of the implications that I found interesting.
 
I must say I've never quite understood the idea of inventing a new language, unless it's clear that no existing language could do the job. Otherwise, you can just pick whatever language is already spoken by the largest number of people and adopt that. Notions of fairness and political correctness make this hard, but it's interesting to see that in certain areas practicality has prevailed. In aviation, one is expected to speak English, and I think that has spread to a few other disciplines as well. Of course it's unfair in a sense, but those who must learn English are no worse off than if they were learning Esperanto or Volapuk or something else. And in the meantime, a goodly number of lingua franca speakers can be expected to be proficient without a lot of new learning and expensive schooling.
 
I was a boarder during secondary school and a prefect at the hostel for the last year or two of that period. (This was all close to 40 years ago now and the school song started with the line "Forty years on when afar and asunder...".)

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, we prefects decided we would create a new language, at the rate of one word per day for ease of learning. I clearly recall that the first word we came up with was "mokodeky", meaning coffee. I don't think we really thought through any of the various technical linguistic details but none of that really mattered in the end as the first new word created was also the last, so far as I can remember.

I've rolled out this little story a few times over my life and so there will be a small group of people who may already understand what "mokodeky" means, but I couldn't go past this amazing opportunity to promote it to a potentially world wide audience.

Thank you for your attention, and enjoy your next mokodekey.

:D
 
bruto said:
I must say I've never quite understood the idea of inventing a new language, unless it's clear that no existing language could do the job.
Click to expand...

Some people make up new languages for their own amusement, as a hobby. An existing language wouldn't do the trick.

For example, JRR Tolkien didn't have to invent entirely new languages such as Sindarin and Quenya to write his stories. He invented them because he wanted to.

ETA: There are some languages invented to be very simple to learn, intended to serve as an international axillary language that would let people communicate with each-other without having to spend a huge amount of time learning the complexities of a natural language. Esperanto was intended to be something like this, but from what I hear it isn't very good at it.
 
Last edited:
quarky said:
The Newyorker magazine is the dec. 24 and 31 issue, this year.
Article is called "Utopian for Beginners" by Joshua Foer.

These articles don't seem to be available on line; not sure. And I'm not clear on how much I can re-print here, without violating stuff.
I'll be back to paraphrase some of the implications that I found interesting.
Click to expand...

The entire article is available to read online, but it's really long: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/24/121224fa_fact_foer

I highly recommend reading this, it's fascinating in many ways, including an unexpected run-in with a cult.
 
That was a very interesting, if extremely lengthy 10-page article. For anyone who doesn't want to read the whole thing, here are a few highlights...

“Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.
Click to expand...

Quijada’s entry into artificial languages was inspired by the utopian politics of Esperanto as well as by the import bin at his local record store, where as a teen-ager, in the nineteen-seventies, he discovered a concept album by the French prog-rock band Magma. All the songs were sung in Kobaïan, a melodic alien language made up by the group’s eccentric lead singer, Christian Vander.

“For someone to actually get onstage and unapologetically sing these gargantuan, operatic, epic songs, it made me realize, **** . . . I’ve got to do this,” Quijada told me. At fifteen, he created Mbozo, the first of his many invented languages, “a relexified generic Romance/Germanic hybrid with African-like phonology.” Another one, Pskeoj, had a vocabulary that was pounded out randomly on a typewriter.
Click to expand...

He was being sent halfway around the world on an all-expenses-paid trip, sponsored by a foreign government, to take part in a conference whose docket of speakers included philosophers, sociologists, economists, biologists, a logician, and a Buddhist monk. Not only had Quijada never been to Kalmykia; he’d never heard of it before.
Click to expand...

The psychoneticists talked into the night about their experiments in “deconcentration of attention” and other techniques of spiritual self-development. But the more Quijada pressed them for an explanation of their philosophy the more elusive it seemed. Above all, he couldn’t quite figure out why they were so obsessed with his language.
Click to expand...

The conference was held in a Soviet-era high-school classroom, the walls of which were covered in chalkboards and forest-green Naugahyde. Most of the attendees were either students or faculty of the University of Effective Development, but none of them, Quijada noted, looked like the typical language geeks he knew from the conlanging community. For one thing, they were more physically imposing; many of the men had shaved heads.
Click to expand...

I glanced over at Quijada, who seemed to be amazed at how well the presenters grasped the fundamentals of his language, and yet increasingly flustered by their weirdness. The group had gathered to discuss linguistic transparency, and yet the more the psychoneticists described their interest in Quijada’s language the more opaque it all seemed.
Click to expand...

Near the end of his speech, the translator stopped speaking. The color had fled his cheeks. “Do you realize who this guy is?” he whispered to me. “This guy is, like, the No. 2 terrorist in Ukraine.”
Click to expand...

Like Heinlein’s fictional secret society of geniuses, who train themselves in Speedtalk in order to think faster and more clearly, Bakhtiyarov and the psychoneticists believe that an Ithkuil training regimen has the potential to reshape human consciousness and help them “solve problems faster.” Though he denies that psychonetics is a political project, it’s hard to uncouple Bakhtiyarov’s dream of creating a Slavic superstate from his dream of creating a Slavic superman—perhaps one who speaks a disciplined, transparent language such as Ithkuil.
Click to expand...
 
Brian-M said:
Some people make up new languages for their own amusement, as a hobby. An existing language wouldn't do the trick.

For example, JRR Tolkien didn't have to invent entirely new languages such as Sindarin and Quenya to write his stories. He invented them because he wanted to.

ETA: There are some languages invented to be very simple to learn, intended to serve as an international axillary language that would let people communicate with each-other without having to spend a huge amount of time learning the complexities of a natural language. Esperanto was intended to be something like this, but from what I hear it isn't very good at it.
Click to expand...
I can certainly understand the fun of creating a new language, and the recreational aspect of trying to develop a better one than any that exist. I should have been more specific in what I said earlier, that my problem is with inventing new languages in which to do business or conduct public life.
 
bruto said:
I must say I've never quite understood the idea of inventing a new language, unless it's clear that no existing language could do the job. Otherwise, you can just pick whatever language is already spoken by the largest number of people and adopt that. Notions of fairness and political correctness make this hard, but it's interesting to see that in certain areas practicality has prevailed. In aviation, one is expected to speak English, and I think that has spread to a few other disciplines as well. Of course it's unfair in a sense, but those who must learn English are no worse off than if they were learning Esperanto or Volapuk or something else. And in the meantime, a goodly number of lingua franca speakers can be expected to be proficient without a lot of new learning and expensive schooling.
Click to expand...

I beg to differ. English is crazy and difficult. That's what the world seems to be learning. It could be cleaned up a lot, for sure; with the myriad exceptions removed; the phonetic disconnects; the silent letters, etc.
People hate that.

To me, the point of a very simple and logical invented language; incorporating some of the fine features of old languages, would be that everyone would need to be bilingual...but not more than that, to be able to communicate wherever they traveled.

Universal sign language would also work that way, but so few know it.

In the article, one of the new languages had only 123 words.
One had 7 sounds.

There are hundreds of these manufactured lingos. Agreeing on one would be tough. But as I'm suggesting, it would be everyone's second language.

Interesting the link between language and behavior, and even brain wiring.
I read of an Australian Aboriginal language that has no words for left and right.
They instead tune into 4 directions; something like n.s.e.w.; hence their 'west foot' becomes their east foot, if they turn 180 degrees. I thought that was wild and neat. Other nearly lost languages had unique ways of preventing ambiguities; others had degrees of truth built in, so that lies didn't happen, except by design and for fun.

I can also imagine that are gizmos will soon allow us to speak to anyone, anywhere, in any language.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom